I watched Rayan Cherki destroy Crystal Palace from the away end at Selhurst Park thirteen days ago, and if I am honest, part of me was too busy admiring what he was doing to be properly angry about it. There is a specific kind of helplessness that comes from watching a player glide through your own defence like the players chasing him are moving through treacle, and Cherki’s first goal that afternoon, a blur of skips and feints through our penalty area before he calmly finished past our goalkeeper, was exactly that kind of moment. It turns out the secret behind those dancing feet has nothing to do with a football pitch at all.
The Video That Made Guardiola Nervous
Back in May, before Cherki had even completed his move to Manchester City from Lyon, a video surfaced of him hitting pads with French boxing coach Omrani Faycal at a gym in Villeurbanne. It was not the usual footballer messing about with gloves on for a laugh. Cherki looked genuinely sharp, throwing real combinations, slipping and rolling with proper technique, moving with the kind of rhythm you associate with actual boxers rather than footballers filling in time during a rehab week.
Pep Guardiola was reportedly asked about the clip at a press conference and joked that it was scary, adding that Cherki would end up playing every game. Even people who actually box for a living were impressed. Former professional boxer Curtis Woodhouse, who won a British light welterweight title after retiring from football himself, apparently said the footage was good enough that if he had not known it was Cherki, he would have assumed he was watching an actual boxer. That is a serious compliment coming from someone who made the opposite career switch himself.
He Is Far From the Only One
What struck me learning more about this is just how many top footballers have some background in boxing. Everton goalkeeper Jordan Pickford and former Manchester United striker Wayne Rooney both apparently grew up around the sport. Rooney has spoken about training at his uncle’s gym in Croxteth as a kid, and there is a famous, slightly mad story about him once sparring with former team mate Phil Bardsley in his own kitchen, a session that reportedly ended with Rooney knocked out on his kitchen floor. He at least had the self awareness to mock himself for it, pretending to collapse after scoring against Tottenham a few days later.
Rooney has apparently credited his childhood boxing training with helping him physically cope with breaking into the Premier League at just sixteen, saying it gave him the strength to handle defenders like Sol Campbell and Martin Keown at an age when most players would have been overwhelmed. Marcus Rashford, Jordan Henderson and Paul Pogba have all reportedly incorporated boxing or kickboxing style training into their own routines at various points too. This is clearly a more common crossover than most fans probably realise.
What Boxing Actually Does for a Footballer
Faycal, who has apparently worked with Cherki for eight years, once a week right up until his move from Lyon, is adamant the benefits are real rather than incidental. He describes the sessions as developing fine coordination between the upper and lower body, the kind of synchronised perception and action required to throw a combination while moving your feet and reading an opponent at the same time. For a technically gifted attacking player, he argues that translates directly into sharper changes of direction and better ability to beat defenders in tight spaces, which, having watched Cherki do exactly that to Palace, is not a hard case to believe.
There is apparently a reaction time benefit too. Faycal says boxing training teaches Cherki to read an opponent’s shoulders, gaze and rhythm in a fraction of a second in order to anticipate incoming punches, a skill that reportedly refines the same kind of anticipation needed to know precisely when to accelerate or feint past a defender before they have even reacted.
Not Everyone Is Convinced
This is where the story gets genuinely interesting, because not every expert agrees boxing actually helps a footballer’s game in the way Faycal describes. Former world champion Richie Woodhall, who has coached at West Bromwich Albion, reportedly believes there is no real footwork benefit at all, arguing the two sports demand fundamentally different physical qualities.
Professor Alan Ruddock, a performance physiologist who has worked with genuine world champion boxers, apparently goes further, describing boxing footwork drills as too polite and tappy for what elite football actually requires. His argument is that a Premier League footballer needs to produce enormous, explosive forces in extremely short bursts, accelerating, decelerating and changing direction under real physical load, and that boxing footwork, for all its elegance, simply does not replicate those forces.
Curtis Woodhouse’s own experience seems to back that up in an oddly charming way. Despite being a professional footballer before switching to boxing, he says everyone expected him to arrive with the footwork of a Vasiliy Lomachenko type fighter, and instead admits he was, in his own words, a bit of a plodder in the ring. Whatever transferable magic exists between the two sports, it apparently was not hiding in his feet.
The Cardiovascular Question
There is a similarly split opinion on fitness benefits. Ruddock says the explosiveness levels he has tested in boxers are nowhere near what Premier League footballers produce, and that boxers generally lack the repeated sprint ability elite footballers need across a ninety minute match. That said, he does concede that a properly structured pad session, with real variation and intensity managed by a skilled coach, can push a boxer towards ninety per cent of their maximum heart rate, meaning there is a genuine cardiovascular stimulus available if the training is done properly rather than as a gentle novelty session.
The Mental Side Might Be the Real Value
If there is one area where boxing’s benefits for footballers seem hardest to dispute, it is the psychological side. Faycal talks about boxing demanding composure under direct pressure and genuine acceptance of confrontation, qualities he believes help a playmaker like Cherki stay decisive in tense late match moments. Ruddock makes a similar point from a different angle, suggesting there is real value in a footballer voluntarily putting themselves into a literal physical battle as preparation for the competitive battles they face twice a week on the pitch. Building self confidence through facing something genuinely uncomfortable in a controlled environment is not a complicated idea, but it is one that seems to show up consistently across multiple experts’ views on this.
Genuine Caution Around the Risks
Faycal himself is careful to flag real caveats before anyone gets too excited about footballers taking up boxing wholesale. Too much volume risks eating into the physical freshness a player needs for actual match performance, and there are obvious injury risks around hands and wrists from repeated impact work, which is apparently why Cherki’s own training is closely supervised and kept away from direct sparring. The goal, as Faycal describes it, is not turning an elite footballer into a boxer, but using boxing as what he nicely calls a subtle turbocharger on an engine that is already running well.
What This Means for Palace Next Time
Having sat through the very performance that sparked this whole conversation, I can say with total confidence that whatever is happening in that gym in Villeurbanne is working for Cherki personally, regardless of what the wider research says about footballers and boxing in general. Whether it was the boxing specifically or simply an exceptionally gifted young footballer doing what exceptionally gifted young footballers do, Palace’s defence did not have an answer for him that afternoon. I suppose there is a strange comfort in knowing it might not be entirely natural talent we were up against. There might genuinely be a boxing gym in France partly responsible for the misery of that particular Saturday.
